Gregory's lips twisted at the corners into a satirical smile.
"When they comes face ter face with me in ther highroad," he answered calmly, "we meets an' makes our manners ther same es anybody else—a man's got ter be civil. But we keeps a'watchin' one another outen ther tails of our eyes, jest ther same. Them two fellers air Blairs an' them an' ther Carrs is married in an' out an' back an' fo'th twell they're all as thick tergether as pigs outen ther same litter."
The traveller's question came a little incredulously.
"You mean—that those men are your actual enemies?"
"I'd call 'em enemies. I knows thet they aims ter git me some day—ef so be they're able."
"And you—?"
The tall man in the road looked steadily into the face of his companion for a moment, then said deliberately, "Me? Oh, of course, I aims ter carcumvent 'em—ef so be I'm able."
When the newcomer had reached a point from which he no longer needed guidance Asa Gregory wheeled and began to back-track on his steps, but before he had covered a half mile he turned abruptly from the road and was swallowed in the thicket where the waxen confusion of rhododendron and laurel, the tangle of holly and thorn seemed solid and impenetrable. He went with head bent and noiseless footfall—though the sifting leaves were crisp—but with eye, ear and nostril delicately alert and receptive.
As Asa Gregory slipped, shadow like, among the shifting lights of the late afternoon, his face wore a grim smile, and when he had come to a point determined by some system of his own, he dropped to a low-crouching posture and continued his journey a step or two at a time, with a perfection of caution, and with eyes and ears strained in expectancy.
Across a gray-green hummock of sandstone, so villainously matted with blackberry briars that a pointer-dog would have balked at its edge, he hitched himself forward on his belly. From there he could look down on the road he had abandoned—and the thick bushes that fringed it, and there he lay, silent and flat as a lizard, scanning the lower ground.